Language

Chinese proverb wrote:

The man who is eloquent and has a sharp tongue can always leave half a sentence unspoken; and he who has right on his side can confidently yield three-tenths of his assertion

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote:

Inferior minds are so not merely because they are distorted, and therefore judge falsely, but primarily through the indistinctness of their whole thinking, which may be compared to seeing through a bad telescope, when all the outlines appear indistinct and as if obliterated, and the different objects run into each other. The weak understanding of such minds shrinks from the demand for distinctness of conceptions, and therefore they do not themselves make this claim upon it, but put up with haziness; and to satisfy themselves with this they gladly have recourse to words, especially such as denote indefinite, very abstract, unusual conceptions which are hard to explain; such, for example, as infinite and finite, sensible and supersensible, the Idea of being, Ideas of the reason, the absolute, the Idea of the good, the divine, moral freedom, power of spontaneous generation, the absolute Idea, subject-object, &c. The like of these they confidently fling about, imagine they really express thoughts, and expect every one to be content with them; for the highest summit of wisdom which they can see is to have at command such ready-made words for every possible question. This immense satisfaction in words is thoroughly characteristic of inferior minds. It depends simply upon their incapacity for distinct conceptions, whenever these must rise above the most trivial and simple relations. Hence upon the weakness and indolence of their intellect, and indeed upon the secret consciousness of this, which in the case of scholars is bound up with the early learnt and hard necessity of passing themselves off as thinking beings, to meet which demand in all cases they keep such a suitable store of ready-made words.

A friendly message to mothers who want their kids influenced by drag. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Kitty Demure (@demure_kitty) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

METAPHOR

Language functions like money. It is only an intermediary. But like money it takes on some of the life of the things it represents. It begins in the world of experience and returns to the world of experience - and it does so via metaphor, which is a function of the right hemisphere, and is rooted in the body.
To use a metaphor, language is the money of thought.
Only the right hemisphere has the capacity to understand metaphor. That might not sound too important – like it could be a nice thing if one were going to do a bit of lit crit. But that is just a sign of the degree to which our world of discourse is dominated by left-hemisphere habits of mind.
Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life.
The word metaphor implies something that carries you across an implied gap (Greek meta- across, pherein carry). When I call language metaphorical, I am not thinking only of Keats addressing the Grecian urn – ‘Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time’.
Here there are clearly many complex, interacting metaphors, and that this creates something new and different from a factual description of the Sosibios Vase is obvious. This is metaphorical language in a dramatic sense. But there are two other, broader, but related, senses in which language is metaphorical. Speaking metaphorically, one might say that language is open to carry us across to the experiential world at the ‘top’ and at the ‘bottom’.
At the ‘top’ end, I am talking about any context – and these are not by any means to be found in poetry alone – in which words are used so as to activate a broad net of connotations, which though present to us, remains implicit, so that the meanings are appreciated as a whole, at once, to the whole of our being, conscious and unconscious, rather than being subject to the isolating effects of sequential, narrow-beam attention. As long as they remain implicit, they cannot be hijacked by the conscious mind and turned into just another series of words, a paraphrase. If this should happen, the power is lost, much like a joke that has to be explained (humour is a right-hemisphere faculty).
At the ‘bottom’ end, I am talking about the fact that every word, in and of itself, eventually has to lead us out of the web of language, to the lived world, ultimately to something that can only be pointed to, something that relates to our embodied existence. Even words such as ‘virtual’ or ‘immaterial’ take us back in their Latin derivation – sometimes by a very circuitous path – to the earthy realities of a man's strength (vir-tus), or the feel of a piece of wood (materia). Everything has to be expressed in terms of something else, and those something elses eventually have to come back to the body. To change the metaphor (and invoke the spirit of Wittgenstein) that is where one's spade reaches bedrock and is turned. There is nothing more fundamental in relation to which we can understand that.
That is why it is like the relation of money to goods in the real world. Money takes its value (at the ‘bottom’ end) from some real, possibly living, things – somebody's cows or chickens, somewhere – and it only really has value as and when it is translated back into real goods or services – food, clothes, belongings, car repairs – in the realm of daily life (at the ‘top’ end). In the meantime it can take part in numerous ‘virtual’ transactions with itself, the sort of things that go on within the enclosed monetary system.
Let me emphasise that the gap across which the metaphor carries us is one that language itself creates. Metaphor is language's cure for the ills entailed on us by language (much as, I believe, the true process of philosophy is to cure the ills entailed on us by philosophising). If the separation exists at the level of language, it does not at the level of experience. At that level the two parts of a metaphor are not similar; they are the same. The German thinker Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter) wrote in 1804, in his Vorschule der Ästhetik:
Ingenious figures of speech can either give soul to the body or body to the spirit. Originally, when man was still at one with the world, this two-dimensional trope did not yet exist; one did not compare that which showed no resemblance, but one proclaimed identities: metaphors were, as with children, necessary synonyms for body and mind. Just as, in the case of writing, pictures preceded the alphabet, metaphor (insofar as it designated relations and not objects) was the first word in spoken language, and only after losing its original colour could it become a literal sign.
A metaphor asserts a common life that is experienced in the body of the one who makes it, and the separation is only present at the linguistic level. Our sense of the commonality of the two ideas, perceptions or entities does not lie in a post hoc derivation of something abstracted from each of them, which is found on subsequent comparison to be similar, or even one and the same thing; but rather on a single concrete, kinaesthetic experience more fundamental than either, and from which they in turn are derived. Thus a clash of arguments and a clash of cymbals are not seen to have something in common only after the disembodied idea of a ‘clash’ is abstracted from the one and from the other, and found – aha! – to be similar; it is rather that these experiences – a clash of arguments and a clash of cymbals, or, for that matter, a clash of swords, or a clash of colours – are felt in our embodied selves as sharing a common nature.
When the metaphor is paraphrased or replaced, whatever had been extralingual, unconscious, and therefore potentially new and alive in the collision of these two entities gets reconstructed, this time in terms only of what is familiar. The point of metaphor is to bring together the whole of one thing with the whole of another, so that each is looked at in a different light. And it works both ways, as the coming together of one thing with another always must. You can't pin one down so that it doesn't move, while the other is drawn towards it: they must draw towards each other. As Max Black says:
‘If to call a man a wolf is to put him in a special light, we must not forget that the metaphor makes the wolf seem more human than he otherwise would.’
And Bruno Snell, discussing the way in which Homer likens the brave warrior to a rock amidst the crashing waves, the rock then, in turn, being described as ‘steadfast’ by analogy with human behaviour, writes perceptively:
This peculiar situation, namely that human behaviour is made clear only through reference to something else which is in turn explained by analogy with human behaviour, pertains to all Homeric similes. More than that, it pertains to all genuine metaphors, and in fact to every single case of human understanding. Thus it is not quite correct to say that the rock is viewed anthropomorphically, unless we add that our understanding of rock is anthropomorphic for the same reason that we are able to look at ourselves petromorphically … man must listen to an echo of himself before he may hear or know himself.
Metaphor (subserved by the right hemisphere) comes before denotation (subserved by the left). This is a historical truth, in the sense that denotative language, even philosophical and scientific language, are derived from metaphors founded on immediate experience of the tangible world.
Metaphor is centrally a matter of thought, not just words. Metaphorical language is a reflection of metaphorical thought … Eliminating metaphor would eliminate philosophy. Without a very large range of conceptual metaphors, philosophy could not get off the ground. The metaphoric character of philosophy is not unique to philosophic thought. It is true of all abstract human thought, especially science. Conceptual metaphor is what makes most abstract thought possible.
It is also a truth about epistemology, how we understand things. Any one thing can be understood only in terms of another thing, and ultimately that must come down to a something that is experienced, outside the system of signs (i.e. by the body). The very words which form the building blocks of explicit thought are themselves all originally metaphors, grounded in the human body and its experience.
Metaphor embodies thought and places it in a living context. These three areas of difference between the hemispheres – metaphor, context and the body – are all interpenetrated one with another.
Once again it is the right hemisphere, in its concern for the immediacy of experience, that is more densely interconnected with and involved in the body, the ground of that experience. Where the right hemisphere can see that metaphor is the only way to preserve the link between language and the world it refers to, the left hemisphere sees it either as a lie (Locke, expressing Enlightenment disdain, called metaphors ‘perfect cheats’) or as a distracting ornament; and connotation as a limitation, since in the interests of certainty the left hemisphere prefers single meanings.
For the left hemisphere, consequently, language can come to seem cut off from the world, to be itself the reality; and reality, for its part, comes to seem made up of bits strung together, as the words are strung together by syntax. The left hemisphere is bound to see language like this because it understands things by starting from the observation of ‘pieces’ and builds them up to make something, and this is the only route it has to understanding both the world and language itself, the medium with which it does its understanding, including its understanding of language.  

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life.

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

Here there are clearly many complex, interacting metaphors, and that this creates something new and different from a factual description of the Sosibios Vase is obvious. This is metaphorical language in a dramatic sense. But there are two other, broader, but related, senses in which language is metaphorical. Speaking metaphorically, one might say that language is open to carry us across to the experiential world at the ‘top’ and at the ‘bottom’.
At the ‘top’ end, I am talking about any context – and these are not by any means to be found in poetry alone – in which words are used so as to activate a broad net of connotations, which though present to us, remains implicit, so that the meanings are appreciated as a whole, at once, to the whole of our being, conscious and unconscious, rather than being subject to the isolating effects of sequential, narrow-beam attention. As long as they remain implicit, they cannot be hijacked by the conscious mind and turned into just another series of words, a paraphrase. If this should happen, the power is lost, much like a joke that has to be explained (humour is a right-hemisphere faculty).

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

Let me emphasise that the gap across which the metaphor carries us is one that language itself creates. Metaphor is language's cure for the ills entailed on us by language (much as, I believe, the true process of philosophy is to cure the ills entailed on us by philosophising).

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

A metaphor asserts a common life that is experienced in the body of the one who makes it, and the separation is only present at the linguistic level. Our sense of the commonality of the two ideas, perceptions or entities does not lie in a post hoc derivation of something abstracted from each of them, which is found on subsequent comparison to be similar, or even one and the same thing; but rather on a single concrete, kinaesthetic experience more fundamental than either, and from which they in turn are derived. Thus a clash of arguments and a clash of cymbals are not seen to have something in common only after the disembodied idea of a ‘clash’ is abstracted from the one and from the other, and found – aha! – to be similar; it is rather that these experiences – a clash of arguments and a clash of cymbals, or, for that matter, a clash of swords, or a clash of colours – are felt in our embodied selves as sharing a common nature. When the metaphor is paraphrased or replaced, whatever had been extralingual, unconscious, and therefore potentially new and alive in the collision of these two entities gets reconstructed, this time in terms only of what is familiar. The point of metaphor is to bring together the whole of one thing with the whole of another, so that each is looked at in a different light. And it works both ways, as the coming together of one thing with another always must

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

Metaphor is centrally a matter of thought, not just words. Metaphorical language is a reflection of metaphorical thought … Eliminating metaphor would eliminate philosophy. Without a very large range of conceptual metaphors, philosophy could not get off the ground. The metaphoric character of philosophy is not unique to philosophic thought. It is true of all abstract human thought, especially science. Conceptual metaphor is what makes most abstract thought possible.

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

Once again it is the right hemisphere, in its concern for the immediacy of experience, that is more densely interconnected with and involved in the body, the ground of that experience. Where the right hemisphere can see that metaphor is the only way to preserve the link between language and the world it refers to, the left hemisphere sees it either as a lie (Locke, expressing Enlightenment disdain, called metaphors ‘perfect cheats’) or as a distracting ornament; and connotation as a limitation, since in the interests of certainty the left hemisphere prefers single meanings.

For the left hemisphere, consequently, language can come to seem cut off from the world, to be itself the reality; and reality, for its part, comes to seem made up of bits strung together, as the words are strung together by syntax. The left hemisphere is bound to see language like this because it understands things by starting from the observation of ‘pieces’ and builds them up to make something, and this is the only route it has to understanding both the world and language itself, the medium with which it does its understanding, including its understanding of language.